What don't you like about human rights?

The past few weeks have been mildly interesting if you
like reading about human rights and why we shouldn’t have them. The idea of people arguing that they shouldn’t
be entitled to human rights always reminds me of a friend of mine who hates the
idea of consumer rights, not because he runs a business but on principle; not
that he lets it stop him exercising his consumer rights when it suits him.

My friend also hates human rights. He doesn’t dislike them or disagree with
them, he hates them. Like many people
who despise the notion of human rights he is also passionately anti-Europe
(although unlike most people he understands that the European Union has nothing
to do with the European Convention on Human Rights). Also like most people who hate human rights,
my friend can’t say which of the individual rights he would like done away with
(and he does know them all being a law graduate from King’s College London and
the University of Law).

The rights and freedoms protected by the ECHR are:

1.Right
to life;

2.Prohibition
of torture;

3.Prohibition
of slavery and forced labour;

4.Right
to liberty and security;

5.Right
to a fair trial;

6.No
punishment without law;

7.Right
to respect for private and family life;

8.Freedom
of thought, conscience and religion;

9.Freedom
of expression;

10.Freedom
of assembly and association;

11.Right
to marry;

12.Right
to an effective remedy (for breach of ECHR); and

13.Prohibition
of discrimination (so far as enjoyment of rights are concerned).

When considering whether we agree or disagree with
anything in law it’s always worth putting yourself or a loved one in the
position of the parties involved. So,
imagine which rights you’d happily be denied to you or your children? Would you deny your son the right to
life? Would you deny your daughter the
freedom from torture? Maybe you’ll
happily see her sold into slavery, provided she’s neither tortured nor
killed? Does the local bobby think your
son is a bit of a chav? Maybe you’d be
happy to do away with the rights to liberty and a fair trial so the police
could lock him up indefinitely without trial?
No punishment without law means an act has to have been a crime at the
time you did it for you to be convicted of a crime.
Let’s imagine you invest in a pension fund that in turn invests in nuclear power
stations. The Greens come to power
(okay I know this is unlikely) and pass a law imprisoning anybody who has, directly or indirectly, invested in nuclear power, does that sound fair? I could go on for quite a while in this way.

The most common response to “what right would you do
without?” is “I don’t mind the rights just the way they are implemented by
judges.” For the most part this is
because the person hasn’t understood the law, the facts or both – or to put it
another way, because a newspaper or politician with an agenda has deliberately
misreported the case. As examples, I
give you Mrs May and the case where she claimed a judge had allowed somebody to
remain in the UK because he owned a cat when in fact the judge had noted the
man owned a cat and said that it had nothing to do with his decision. What about Chris Grayling our Justice
Secretary who last year teamed up with the Daily Mail to decry the European
Union’s Charter of Fundamental Rights – a document that does not apply to the
UK in any event – which he claimed created 54 “new” rights. In fact it’s a restatement of the ECHR for
the most part and a small handful of “new” rights that are, in any case almost all already
the law in the UK. The "new" laws require doctors to obtain consent before
conducting medical procedures and ban child labour.

Here’s a good example of some mis-leading coverage from the Daily Mail. Here’s a couple of
highlights. They claim that the UK has
lost 202 cases before the European Court of Human Rights, which is true,
although they neglect to point out that the ECtHR has considered 13,515 cases
against the UK. In the original story,
the Mail claimed that £4.4M had been paid out in compensation to criminals
where in fact they later admitted that the total compensation ordered by the ECtHR is only £1.7M and that this money
went to a range of claimants, not just criminals. Also, the Mail has lumped this story together
with two apparently unrelated ones about gas prices and the former Director of
Public Prosecution’s incorrect assessment of the law on abortion. I’d suggest the only reason this was done is
to provide a misleading impression to readers and generate further hatred of
the human rights that were created after the second world war to protect us all…
incidentally, you might recall that the Daily Mail was the newspaper that
supported Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party as he committed the very crimes that led to
the creation of modern human rights!

In the past couple of weeks I’ve read some interesting
new reasons why we should do away with human rights, the gist of which seems
to be that a) Hitler would probably have ignored them anyway so there's no point in trying to have laws that might have stopped him; and b) nations outside of the west do not agree with our western concept of
human rights and so they are doomed.
Interestingly, I’ve yet to see any of these people suggest an
alternative that they would approve of and that is acceptable to both the west
and the east (and I suppose the north and the south).

Human rights may well be the modern morality for a world
rapidly removed from the morality of religion.
I am happy to consider some alternative to human rights but I’ve yet to
see one that is more acceptable to everybody than what we have now. Having said that, I do have one alternative:
I would be happy to become your leader and I will promise to ensure that
everyone is nice to each other and not to kill too many of you when you
displease me. I could be given the title
Lord Protector in Perpetuity. I think I’d
make a good leader of the world and moral compass for you all.

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Comments

As far as I can see, the Daily ("Hurrah for the Blackshirts") Mail readers of this world think they don't need rights because the police would never give them any trouble. They cannot picture themselves being accused of anything.

This reminds me of a fundamental hypocrisy of modern politics. Let's say the Dotted Party is in power and the Striped Party is in opposition. The Dotted Party proposes yet another new law that gives it huge amounts of unaccountable power. The Dotted party knows perfectly well that it won't win every election forever more. It claims the Striped Party is made up of frothing loons who want to destroy society. If that were true, it wouldn't be willing to give itself the extra power, knowing that the Striped Party will also have it sooner or later.

TDB, this is incorrect except in the strictest sense. HR are strictly vertical (against governments only), but if the government fails to protect my HR against my fellow citizen (a horizontal relationship), I absolutely can sue the govt for that failure.

What we need is more mature, accurate reporting and commentary in some of our media. See my deconstruction of how the Daily Mail covered the non-story of Romanians and Bulgarians coming to the UK from 1 January. 'Daily Mail: Trick or Truth? You Decide'

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